AND THE NEWSIES SUPPORT...

This morning as I was on the elevator up to my 17th floor gulag, I caught a headline on one of those newfangled built-in news tickers that provide us all with useless information before entering the huge black hole of American bureaucracy that we call our jobs. The headline read: "Boston Herald Backs McCain For President". It seems like a common practice these days for a media outlet to support a certain candidate for office. But why? We've all seemed to accept this fact, which has violently changed from its original Thanksgiving-loving puritan form to a rape-and-pillage invader of public soil. How has journalism evolved this far to influence politics and government in such a direct and somewhat predatory manner?

I took a Journalism class in college, and I what I gathered from the course was that the whole point of the job was to teach us to be "fair and unbiased" in what we presented as news to the public. Now I know that Fox News has taken that phrase and run it through the mud wrestling ring of eye-catching news reporting, but you'd like to think that one news source would have the ethics enough to actually uphold it. It just doesn't make sense to me. Why are we relying on our news outlets to tell us who to vote for? Isn't that why we have something called political campaigns? I'm an Obama supporter, but I would be disappointed if The Washington Post declared him their choice for president. I'm just not for it. The common citizen puts way too much stock in the media, and for one person to be able to make a free-thinking decision, without influence from their preferred source of information, would be an ideal thing. The candidates are the ones that need to convince us to vote for them, not some editor or producer at The New York Times or MSNBC. I need to know that Sally from Seattle or Mookie from Mississippi based their votes on clear and truthful first-hand information rather than an op-ed paper written by a jaded wordsmith.

The current news source that all Americans should definitely "fear", Al-Jazeerah, has an interestingly familiar code of ethics. In particular, their first rule:

"Adhere to the journalistic values of honesty, courage, fairness, balance, independence, credibility and diversity, giving no priority to commercial or political considerations over professional ones."

I'm sure that's how our American version of ethical code started out, and then quickly started to crumble under the Orwellian style of control that technology has allowed the government to operate with. But its definitely refreshing to see that the Arab-based network, which survives within a "backwards" Islamic society, seems to have a better grasp on news reporting than do our own outlets. Even if it involves airing beheadings and executions.

So I'm predicting that this issue will be repetitive dribble that most people have thought about in the past with a dismissive eye and ear, and will continue to think about in the future, but will do nothing in regards to it - including myself. But that seems to be the problem with most people.